Monday memory: The Spring Luau

Reaching back to my local music days.

This photo is of my old friends in Semiblind, taken at the 2010 Spring Luau. They were one of nine bands who appeared at a long evening of good rock and roll.

There was a period of about a decade in my life where I spent an inordinate amount of time standing in bars listening to a lot of local bands pour out their heart and soul. Whether it was trying to make it big or just trying to make a buck, at that time the area around Ocean City, Maryland had two key ingredients: places to play and bands who wanted to play there.

I got to thinking about all this the other day when a memory came up on my social media about some good friends of mine in a band called Semiblind. (If you saw my Christmas post this past year and the attached video, you heard and saw the husband-and-wife team that created Semiblind, the singer and guitar player at photo right.) In turn, that got me thinking about an event that kicked off the season for most bands as Ocean City woke up from its winter slumber. When it came to the mid-March Spring Luau (or 12 Bands of Christmas, which was the brainchild of the same promoter), Semiblind was one of the staple performers.

These events were created by a local radio DJ and program director (as well as drummer for a former KISS cover band called Rock Bottom) by the professional moniker of Skip Dixxon. And these combined two key elements for a music fan like me: lots of good rock bands on one evening with no cover charge. (It made for a lot of videos on my long-dormant Youtube page.)

I started getting into this local music scene just a few months after moving here, newly single again and buoyed by a long-dormant event called the Beast of the East custom motorcycle show. The motorcycles were inside the Wicomico Youth and Civic Center and a handful of bands were outside in the early April afternoon. I liked what I heard and wanted more.

Just a few weeks later came two other late, lamented spring staples in Salisbury: Pork in the Park (a barbeque festival) and the Salisbury Festival. Both of them were multi-band events as well. And all summer long that first year I lived here we had postgame concerts on Thursday nights at the Shorebird games (one of which was an early show by long-running reggae/rock band Ballyhoo! from Aberdeen, Maryland.)

But the good stuff came with the Spring Luau and it introduced me to what was then (back in the mid-aughts) a vibrant local music scene in Ocean City.

One such OC band was Lennex, whose lead singer Phil Ritchie was a contestant on the 2006 reality show Rock Star: Supernova. He even created a little controversy when he stated to a local paper that he was in the show to help out his band moreso than to sing for Supernova.

These Maryland- and Delaware-based groups also had support from local radio, which also spun a lot of tunes from local and other regional bands hailing from Philadelphia and Baltimore. A couple of my favorites from those locations, respectively: Not Alone and Skitzo Calypso, who still puts out good music to this day.

But all good things come to an end: we had the Great Recession, and the technology that allowed bands to share homemade CDs of their latest single by the mid-aughts became the social media where they could distribute .mp3 versions by the end of the decade. Problem was that DJ technology was evolving just as quickly, allowing someone with a couple amps and a laptop to set up in a bar - and draw just as many tourons as a cover band (let alone one that played originals) for a fraction of the price at a time when venue owners were becoming very cost-conscious.

The last Spring Luau I have photos from is 2010, which happens to be the one I pictured above. I think they went on for a couple more years afterward (and some of my photos on my old laptop were lost, which means I may have gone and have no evidence) but almost everyone has moved on, and those who haven’t are the true survivors.

And while I don’t do the bars anymore, I still like to catch a concert every so often. The last one I made it to was Jeremy Camp at the aforementioned Civic Center.

Jeremy Camp came to the Wicomico Youth and Civic Center back on November 14, 2024.

But that was a part of my life I wouldn’t trade for anything.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.